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Wed, 22 Jul 2015 19:18:12 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.6.1Researchers Open Repository for ‘Dark Data’https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/scientists-open-repository-for-dark-data/57125
https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/scientists-open-repository-for-dark-data/57125#commentsWed, 22 Jul 2015 18:41:41 +0000Mary Ellen McIntirehttp://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/?p=57125Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are leading an effort to create a one-stop shop for data sets that would otherwise be lost to the public after the papers they were produced for are published.

The goal of the project, called DataBridge, is to expand the life cycle of so-called dark data, said Arcot Rajasekar, the lead principal investigator on the project and a professor in the School of Information and Library Science at Chapel Hill. It will serve as an archive for...

]]>Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are leading an effort to create a one-stop shop for data sets that would otherwise be lost to the public after the papers they were produced for are published.

The goal of the project, called DataBridge, is to expand the life cycle of so-called dark data, said Arcot Rajasekar, the lead principal investigator on the project and a professor in the School of Information and Library Science at Chapel Hill. It will serve as an archive for data sets and metadata, and will group them into clusters of information to make relevant data easier to find.

“You can reuse it, repurpose it, and then maybe someone else will reuse it, and see how we can enable that to get more science,” Mr. Rajasekar said.

A key aspect of the project will be how it allows researchers to make connections, “so that a person who wants to use the data will be able to pull in other data of a similar nature,” he said.

The hope is that eventually researchers from around the country will submit their data after publishing their findings. Also involved in the project are researchers at North Carolina A&T State and Harvard Universities, and it was funded by the National Science Foundation three years ago.

The researchers are also interested in including another type of “dark data”: archives of social-media posts. For example, Mr. Rajasekar has imagined creating algorithms to sort through tweets posted during the Arab Spring, for researchers studying the role of social media in the movement.

The project could save researchers time, said Laura Mandell, director of the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture at Texas A&M University at College Station. “People spend a lot of time cleaning their data, and we don’t need to each be reinventing the wheel, performing the same tasks on the same data sets,” she said.

And in some cases, the project could serve as a model for libraries at research institutions that are looking to better track data in line with federal requirements, said Bruce Herbert, director of digital services and scholarly communications and a geology professor at Texas A&M. He said it could also extend researchers’ “trusted network” of colleagues with whom they share data.

]]>https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/scientists-open-repository-for-dark-data/57125/feed0Web Platform Seeks to Give Students an Alternative to the ‘Wall of Text’https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/web-platform-seeks-to-give-students-an-alternative-to-the-wall-of-text/57099
https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/web-platform-seeks-to-give-students-an-alternative-to-the-wall-of-text/57099#commentsTue, 14 Jul 2015 08:56:05 +0000Meg Bernhardhttp://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/?p=57099It’s difficult to keep students engaged — and awake — when assigning them readings from long and often dull textbooks. Two researchers wanted to change that.

Their creation is zyBooks, a web-based platform that mixes learning activities such as question sets and animations with some written content, largely as a replacement for text. The idea is that professors can use zyBooks instead of traditional textbooks in order to help students engage with the material and perform better.

]]>It’s difficult to keep students engaged — and awake — when assigning them readings from long and often dull textbooks. Two researchers wanted to change that.

Their creation is zyBooks, a web-based platform that mixes learning activities such as question sets and animations with some written content, largely as a replacement for text. The idea is that professors can use zyBooks instead of traditional textbooks in order to help students engage with the material and perform better.

zyBooks was founded in 2012 by Frank Vahid, a computer-science professor at the University of California at Riverside, and Smita Bakshi, a former assistant professor at the University of California at Davis who is the company’s chief executive. They say the platform is being used by professors at around 250 universities, primarily in courses in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

“Every time students see a wall of text, they skip it,” said Mr. Vahid.

Homework is another experience that Mr. Vahid and Ms. Bakshi wanted to improve, for students and professors. With traditional textbooks, students may have to flip between their texts and their assignments, often retaining less material. With the zyBooks platform, homework is integrated into the system and personalized to students’ ability levels. Professors can also track students’ progress.

Additionally, at $48 each, zyBooks products are considerably cheaper than the average cost of a new textbook.

Although likened to digital textbooks, Mr. Vahid said they “are very different than a book.” In fact, in the platform’s first year, the founders resisted even having “book” in the product’s name because they thought the word would inaccurately describe what they were trying to do. They eventually kept the name, however, to help explain the platform”s purpose.

Indeed, the digital textbook is hardly a new idea. While plenty of companies and groups have begun to shift content online and into e-books, the “next step” is for such textbooks to personalize information and to encourage interactivity and collaboration with other students, said Erin Walker, an assistant professor of engineering at Arizona State University who was awarded a National Science Foundation grant to study digital textbooks. To her, it seems that the company “is really going for this idea of interactivity and active learning.”

The company has conducted research with people using its platform and found that students self-reported higher levels of engagement with a zyBooks product, as compared to a textbook on the same topic. Students also tended to perform better on quizzes and other activities, the research found.

Although the platform initially was focused on computer science and other classes in STEM fields, Ms. Bakshi said the group hoped to move into other topics, such as finance, accounting, and sociology.

]]>https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/web-platform-seeks-to-give-students-an-alternative-to-the-wall-of-text/57099/feed0New Model of ‘Smart Campus’? Carnegie Mellon to Embed Sensors Across Landscapehttps://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/new-model-of-smart-campus-carnegie-mellon-to-embed-sensors-across-landscape/57079
https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/new-model-of-smart-campus-carnegie-mellon-to-embed-sensors-across-landscape/57079#commentsFri, 10 Jul 2015 08:55:22 +0000Meg Bernhardhttp://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/?p=57079Imagine a world where you’re driving to campus, and before you get there, your car tells you to park in one lot because it already knows another is full. That could soon be the reality at Carnegie Mellon University, where researchers have teamed up with Google to place wireless sensors around the campus to connect everyday items with the web.

The idea is to make life more convenient, and to provide useful data about the campus, said Anind K. Dey, the project’s lead investigator and an associate ...

]]>Imagine a world where you’re driving to campus, and before you get there, your car tells you to park in one lot because it already knows another is full. That could soon be the reality at Carnegie Mellon University, where researchers have teamed up with Google to place wireless sensors around the campus to connect everyday items with the web.

The idea is to make life more convenient, and to provide useful data about the campus, said Anind K. Dey, the project’s lead investigator and an associate professor at the university’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. And it won’t stop at Carnegie Mellon’s borders. Eventually, the experiment is to expand into the city of Pittsburgh, in hospitals, at bus stops, on bridges.

Mr. Dey envisions that the campus could be wired with temperature sensors, cameras, microphones, humidity sensors, vibration sensors, and more in order to provide people with information about the physical world around them. Students could determine whether their professors were in their offices, or see what friends were available for lunch. Building managers could use the sensors to figure out how much energy was being used in particular campus locations. “It should radically change the experiences people have in their spaces,” Mr. Dey said.

Google gave Carnegie Mellon $500,000 in seed funding and access to its proprietary technologies in order to start the project, Mr. Dey said. He and his group of researchers will begin the experiment by placing sensors in their own offices and labs, and by 2016 they hope to expand the project to the rest of the campus. The open-platform project will also involve researchers at Cornell University, Stanford University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Security and privacy are top priorities, said Yuvraj Agarwal, an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon and one of the project’s researchers. The group will allow users to opt into the system and customize what information they are willing to make available.

Still, Mr. Dey acknowledged that the project could bring unintended consequences. “I could also imagine it will expose things that people would rather not know about,” he said. “That exposure might not always be a good thing.”

Mr. Agarwal, for his part, said it was unclear how the experiment could alter people’s behavior and interactions. “How does this change us,” he said, “when everything around us is sensed and available?”

]]>https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/new-model-of-smart-campus-carnegie-mellon-to-embed-sensors-across-landscape/57079/feed0Professor Says Facebook Can Help Informal Learninghttps://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/professor-says-facebook-can-help-informal-learning/57059
https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/professor-says-facebook-can-help-informal-learning/57059#commentsTue, 30 Jun 2015 08:55:02 +0000Meg Bernhardhttp://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/?p=57059Who says Facebook is always a distraction? A new study suggests that if engaged in online debate, college students can use the popular social network to learn and develop a variety of skills.

In a paper released on Monday, Christine Greenhow, an assistant professor of education at Michigan State University, argues that using informal social-media settings to carry on debates about science can help students refine their argumentative skills, increase their scientific literacy, and supplement lear...

]]>Who says Facebook is always a distraction? A new study suggests that if engaged in online debate, college students can use the popular social network to learn and develop a variety of skills.

In a paper released on Monday, Christine Greenhow, an assistant professor of education at Michigan State University, argues that using informal social-media settings to carry on debates about science can help students refine their argumentative skills, increase their scientific literacy, and supplement learning in the classroom. Past studies have shown that informal settings, like conversations with friends, can facilitate learning, but according to Ms. Greenhow, very little has been studied about informal online contexts and social networks, like Facebook applications.

Ms. Greenhow and her research partners studied a group of nearly 350 students — some in high school and most in college — using a Facebook application about climate change called Hot Dish. Within the open-source application, students could post articles and start comment threads. Unlike discussion forums that professors might require students to use, using the Facebook application was voluntary, not connected to a particular course, and driven by interest in the topic.

Ms. Greenhow and her group developed codes to determine the presence of different types of argumentative skills in comment threads. “We did see argumentation, we did see that debate was on-topic and on-task,” she said. “It wasn’t purely social, it wasn’t off-topic.”

Of the 346 people in the group, only about 30 started their own comment threads or participated regularly, however, suggesting that those who benefited from the discussion were already very interested in the topic. “It may be that such social-media applications will be most effective with a core group of highly interested niche users rather than broadly applicable to all learners,” the paper says.

In the future, Ms. Greenhow said, she would be interested in studying the levels of engagement in similar Facebook applications, and how to encourage other participants to join in discussion more regularly.

In order to improve in-class discussion, Ms. Greenhow said, she would advise professors to point students to specific forums within social-media platforms. Informal learning, she said, “informs the kinds of authentic learning that takes place in the classroom.”

]]>https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/professor-says-facebook-can-help-informal-learning/57059/feed0Researchers Complain About Changes in Amazon Tool Used for Surveyshttps://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/researchers-complain-about-changes-in-amazon-tool-used-for-surveys/57031
https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/researchers-complain-about-changes-in-amazon-tool-used-for-surveys/57031#commentsTue, 23 Jun 2015 19:17:13 +0000Mary Ellen McIntirehttp://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/?p=57031This week Amazon changed the terms for a service that has become a standard tool in social-science research, and many scholars are complaining that it will mean higher costs to conduct surveys.

The service is called Mechanical Turk, and it is a marketplace that connects people on the Internet looking for paid piecework with anyone who has a small task and is willing to pay someone to do it. The concept is known as crowd-work, and many researchers have used it to pay strangers small amounts ...

]]>This week Amazon changed the terms for a service that has become a standard tool in social-science research, and many scholars are complaining that it will mean higher costs to conduct surveys.

The service is called Mechanical Turk, and it is a marketplace that connects people on the Internet looking for paid piecework with anyone who has a small task and is willing to pay someone to do it. The concept is known as crowd-work, and many researchers have used it to pay strangers small amounts to take part in social-science surveys.

Amazon announced on Monday that it would take a larger commission on each gig, increasing its percentage to 20 percent from 10 percent next month. That means researchers will have to pay Amazon 20 percent of the roughly $7 or $8 per hour that respondents earn for completing a survey. Researchers have said the change will mean a significant extra charge to younger scholars who have relied on the service to quickly gather a large number of survey responses at a low cost.

Mechanical Turk is probably the most popular research pool in the social sciences right now, said Carey Morewedge, an associate professor of marketing at Boston University. While graduate students conducting research once had to spend a day or two surveying undergraduates, they can now gather at least double the number of responses in two hours using Mechanical Turk, he said.

“It’s really had a tremendous effect on the amount of research that can be done on the social sciences, particularly the researchers with more limited access to grants and research funding,” he said.

Paying the extra cost of Mechanical Turk could make it more difficult for researchers with smaller budgets to send graduate students abroad or travel to a conference, he added.

Some researchers took to Twitter to express their frustration with the added cost:

]]>https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/researchers-complain-about-changes-in-amazon-tool-used-for-surveys/57031/feed0Universities Ban Smart Watches During Finalshttps://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/universities-ban-smart-watches-during-finals/57003
https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/universities-ban-smart-watches-during-finals/57003#commentsThu, 18 Jun 2015 08:55:45 +0000Mary Ellen McIntirehttp://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/?p=57003Some Australian universities warned students this month not to wear wristwatches during final exams, amid concerns that increasingly popular wearable technology, like the Apple Watch, could foster cheating.

La Trobe University, in Melbourne, and the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, both issued warnings at the start of their final-exam periods that students would have to remove their watches before testing began. The University of New South Wales required students to put all wristwatches...

]]>Some Australian universities warned students this month not to wear wristwatches during final exams, amid concerns that increasingly popular wearable technology, like the Apple Watch, could foster cheating.

La Trobe University, in Melbourne, and the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, both issued warnings at the start of their final-exam periods that students would have to remove their watches before testing began. The University of New South Wales required students to put all wristwatches in clear bags under their desks. La Trobe students could place traditional watches on their desks while taking exams, but they could not have smart watches in an exam room.

Such policies are likely to be in place soon at American universities, said Eric Klopfer, director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It is becoming increasingly more difficult to distinguish a smart watch from a traditional watch, he said, so if colleges don’t want students to wear smart watches during exams, they’ll probably have to ban all watches.

There has also been a push to create tests that would be immune to students’ efforts to store answers on their phones or watches, Mr. Klopfer said. He compared the approach to open-book exams, which focus less on memorization and more on analysis.

“As we get better at our educational system, it will seem less like we need to ban these things,” he said, “because the kinds of things we’ll be putting on an exam students won’t be able to store on a watch.”

The Australian universities aren’t the first to ban smart watches from exam rooms, though. The Educational Testing Service, which administers the Graduate Record Examination and the Test of English as a Foreign Language, started using wands years ago to ensure that test takers didn’t carry cellphones into exams, said Ray Nicosia, executive director for ETS’s Office of Testing Integrity.

Proctors can use the same wands — similar to those seen at airport security lines — to check whether test takers are wearing watches. So now the proctors can ask to inspect the watches and store them in a locker, if necessary. The company wants to “stay ahead of anyone taking an unfair advantage,” Mr. Nicosia said.

“The test takers comply,” he said. “They want to get in, take their test, and move on.”

]]>https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/universities-ban-smart-watches-during-finals/57003/feed0Art Schools Go MOOC, With a New Online Platformhttps://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/art-schools-go-mooc-new-online-platform-works-with-art-programs-at-18-colleges/56947
https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/art-schools-go-mooc-new-online-platform-works-with-art-programs-at-18-colleges/56947#commentsTue, 16 Jun 2015 08:55:41 +0000Meg Bernhardhttp://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/?p=56947A new company is jumping into MOOCs, but with a focus on teaching free courses in the arts.

The new virtual art school, called Kadenze, has already teamed up with programs at 18 institutions, including Stanford and Princeton Universities, to create a digital platform designed for arts courses. According to a company co-founder, Perry R. Cook, an emeritus professor at Princeton, the platform will be “multimedia rich” and allow students to create online portfolios, upload music files and scanned a...

]]>A new company is jumping into MOOCs, but with a focus on teaching free courses in the arts.

The new virtual art school, called Kadenze, has already teamed up with programs at 18 institutions, including Stanford and Princeton Universities, to create a digital platform designed for arts courses. According to a company co-founder, Perry R. Cook, an emeritus professor at Princeton, the platform will be “multimedia rich” and allow students to create online portfolios, upload music files and scanned art, watch videos, and participate in discussion forums.

Kadenze will initially offer about 20 courses on subjects including music, art history, and technology and art. Students will be able to enroll in courses and watch videos free, but they will have to pay $7 a month if they want to submit assignments and receive grades and feedback. Fees of $300, $600, or $900 will be charged for courses that are offered for credit.

Kadenze was started by art and technology insiders, Mr. Cook said. He and another co-founder, Ajay Kapur, director of music technology at the California Institute of the Arts, had collaborated on a programming course for artists on a competing platform, Coursera, a few years ago, and had been frustrated by some of its limitations. Mr. Cook said they designed Kadenze so that people could use it to make playlists and create art portfolios, among other functions. He likened it to “a nice open arts school, where everybody is hanging out together” and looking at one another’s work.

Chris Chafe, director of Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, said that his group had decided to work with Kadenze because it is “manifestly dedicated to the arts right from the get-go.” His center will pilot the platform this year with support from Stanford’s office of the vice provost for teaching and learning.

Mr. Cook anticipates that Kadenze’s courses will attract a broad range of students, but that the primary interest will be from artists, performers, and those interested in going to art school.

]]>https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/art-schools-go-mooc-new-online-platform-works-with-art-programs-at-18-colleges/56947/feed0Students in Free Courses Study, but Not as Much as Most Students Dohttps://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/students-in-free-courses-study-but-not-as-much-as-most-students-do/56935
https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/students-in-free-courses-study-but-not-as-much-as-most-students-do/56935#commentsTue, 16 Jun 2015 08:55:17 +0000Mary Ellen McIntirehttp://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/?p=56935Most students in free online courses don’t spend as much time doing classwork as do traditional college students, but they do log a significant number of hours, according to a new survey of more than 4,500 MOOC students by Class Central, a website that reviews free courses.

More than 55 percent of the students surveyed said they studied two to five hours per week, and 22 percent said they spent six to 10 hours per week studying.

How does that compare with traditional college students? About 43 p...

]]>Most students in free online courses don’t spend as much time doing classwork as do traditional college students, but they do log a significant number of hours, according to a new survey of more than 4,500 MOOC students by Class Central, a website that reviews free courses.

More than 55 percent of the students surveyed said they studied two to five hours per week, and 22 percent said they spent six to 10 hours per week studying.

How does that compare with traditional college students? About 43 percent of first-year residential college students reported spending more than six hours per week studying, according to the Fall 2014 edition of the Freshman Survey, by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program, part of the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Class Central sent out the survey to about 50,000 subscribers to its newsletter, an effort that yielded a few hundred responses. A professor who teaches a massive open online course offered by Coursera also sent the survey to about 800,000 current and former MOOC students, who made up a majority of respondents, said Charlie Chung, chief editor of Class Central’s blog and the survey’s manager.

A majority of the respondents reported having taken at least two MOOCs and came from a sample of students who had enrolled in a course called “Learning to Learn,” which didn’t focus on a particular subject area.

The data show that students do not dedicate one particular time of the week to complete their coursework, Mr. Chung said in an interview. Across the board, students who study during the week tend to do so in the evenings, while those who work on the weekend seem to do so during the day.

“People who are spending a fair amount of time on them are fitting it into their schedules in a very flexible way, not in a rigid way,” he said.

But the sample size of the survey is imperfect, said Justin Reich, a researcher at Harvard University who studies online education.

“The people who respond to surveys about their experience are different than people who take the courses broadly,” Mr. Reich said, adding that the students who complete surveys about MOOCs tend to be the most successful.

CourseTalk, another website that lets users post reviews of MOOCs, also found in a recent survey that students were willing to pay for higher-quality courses, and that paid courses were rated 1.4 stars higher, on average, than free courses were.

]]>https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/students-in-free-courses-study-but-not-as-much-as-most-students-do/56935/feed0Coding Boot Camps Are on the Risehttps://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/coding-boot-camps-are-on-the-rise/56915
https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/coding-boot-camps-are-on-the-rise/56915#commentsWed, 10 Jun 2015 08:55:42 +0000Meg Bernhardhttp://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/?p=56915The unaccredited education programs known as coding boot camps are proliferating, and gaining more students. This year the number of graduates from such programs is expected to hit 16,000, up from 6,740 in 2014, according to a recent survey by Course Report, a business that focuses on the sector.

At the boot camps, which are not affiliated with colleges or universities and which offer in-person instruction, students can work and study programming for 10 hours a day — or more — for months at ...

]]>The unaccredited education programs known as coding boot camps are proliferating, and gaining more students. This year the number of graduates from such programs is expected to hit 16,000, up from 6,740 in 2014, according to a recent survey by Course Report, a business that focuses on the sector.

At the boot camps, which are not affiliated with colleges or universities and which offer in-person instruction, students can work and study programming for 10 hours a day — or more — for months at a time. One such program, AIT Learning, based in Washington, D.C., says on its website that prospective students should expect to study 10 to 14 hours a day and to “work with peers till late and make some real-world programs.”

The programs aren’t cheap, either. A summary of the Course Report survey notes that the average cost of the courses is more than $11,000. There are about 70 of the programs in the United States and Canada today.

Many programs market themselves to recent college graduates who want to improve their job prospects and to people seeking to change their careers. Michael Kaiser-Nyman, founder of Epicodus, a boot camp based in Portland, Ore., estimates that two-thirds of students who have enrolled in his program have attended college before.

Gardner Campbell, vice provost for learning innovation and student success at Virginia Commonwealth University, says “it’s clear that the job landscape will require more people to do this kind of programming work for the foreseeable future.”

But the pool of enrolled students is broad. Last week Skill Distillery, a boot camp focused on Java programming, announced that military veterans may use their GI Bill education benefits to enroll in the program. In March, President Obama announced an initiative, called TechHire, to train Americans in technology jobs. Among other things, the effort encourages people to enroll in coding boot camps.

The Course Report survey estimates that nearly 49,000 computer-science majors graduated from accredited American colleges and universities in 2014. Computer-science courses tend to be more theoretical and in-depth, says Trace Urdan, an independent analyst, while coding boot camps tend to be hands-on and have a vocational focus. Mr. Urdan says that the coding-boot-camp “craze” is likely to level out in the future and that college programs won’t redesign their curricula to respond to that demand.

But boot camps have the potential to complement computer-science departments’ curricula if students enroll in a coding program first, Mr. Campbell says.

“In many respects,” he says, “computer-science departments will find that their own intellectual breadth increases as a result of students’ being immersed in this kind of learning before they come to college.”

]]>https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/coding-boot-camps-are-on-the-rise/56915/feed0Can Digital Badges Help Encourage Professors to Take Teaching Workshops?https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/can-digital-badges-help-encourage-professors-to-take-teaching-workshops/56901
https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/can-digital-badges-help-encourage-professors-to-take-teaching-workshops/56901#commentsTue, 09 Jun 2015 08:56:37 +0000Jeffrey R. Younghttp://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/?p=56901A few colleges are trying a new incentive to get professors to participate in professional-development workshops: digital badges.

Several badge formats have emerged that can be embedded on a LinkedIn profile or a personal web page, in a way that certifies the achievement was in fact earned and can be clicked on to reveal a detailed record of what the learner did to get the badge. Among the most popular badge platforms are Credly and the Mozilla Open Badges project.

Now some colleges are trying the badge approach in their in-house training, in part to expose more professors to the badge concept so they might try it in their own courses.

Kent State University, for instance, is offering badges to professors who complete workshops on how to improve their online teaching, which are offered by Kent State Online. The group started the experiment last November, and it has awarded about 500 badges during the 12 workshops it has given since then.

“Our motivation is to provide faculty a convenient means to track and display their professional-development efforts,” said Valerie Kelly, executive director of Kent State Online. “There are a lot of people putting a lot of effort into creating really good online courses.”

Many professors don’t seem to be in it for the badge, though. In fact, only about 150 badges were “accepted,” meaning that a recipient registered to receive a badge so he or she could show it off.

Still, badges are probably more valuable to professors than are the paper certificates that Kent State traditionally gave to those who completed training workshops in the past. “It’s an easy way for a professor to show that I’m that type of faculty member that goes and does faculty development,” said Ms. Kelly.

The University of Central Florida has been experimenting with badges for its technology workshops as well. And in addition to offering its own badge for a blended-learning workshop, the university teamed up with Educause, a professional group for officials working in technology roles at colleges, to offer a joint badge — with hopes that it could become a standard. To earn the Educause-branded badge, participants have to both pass the workshop and submit a portfolio of homework for review, and pay an $89 fee.

Kelvin Thompson, associate director of the Center for Distributed Learning at Central Florida, said that whether the Educause badge has value for a professor depends on how well known Educause is in the circles a faculty member moves in. The badge, he said, “has value if you think it has value.”